The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

· Sold by HarperCollins
4.3
9 reviews
Ebook
336
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

One of Vox’s Most Important Books of the Decade

New York Times Editors' Choice 2017

Forbes Top 10 Best Environment, Climate, and Conservation Book of 2017

As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future

Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future.

Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits.

Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.

Ratings and reviews

4.3
9 reviews
Robert Sullivan
March 25, 2024
The author's premise implying carbon dioxide is either the root cause of all these mass extinctions or a major factor in causing them is not correct. Carbon dioxide spikes during these events can be attributed to the loss of biomass during these extinctions, which removed plant life as a natural sink of carbon dioxide. We see this annually with current CO2 observations: CO2 concentrations go up in the Northern Hemisphere's winter when plant life is dormant and go down when it is summer and plant life is active as a natural carbon sink. So the spikes in carbon dioxide during these catastrophes were not the cause of them, but rather were the result of them.
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rey elcid b. abetria
July 4, 2017
underground affected radio wave activetion frquency. to comtanaimated soil oxygen to expand and explode from underground heat due to cumputer word call uncontrol radio air active tunnel
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Magnus Börjesson
May 20, 2023
What a brilliant deep history perspective of life and death on Planet Earth. Terrifying and very well written.
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About the author

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Washington Post, Slate, Boston Globe, Aeon, and others. A graduate of Boston College, he was a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the Duke University National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and a 2011 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellow. This is his first book.

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